Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday March 10, 2014 @08:52AM
from the water-dissolving-and-water-removing dept.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Mames McWilliams writes in the NYT that with California experiencing one of its worst droughts on record, attention has naturally focused on the water required to grow popular foods such as walnuts, broccoli, lettuce, tomatoes, strawberries, almonds and grapes. 'Who knew, for example, that it took 5.4 gallons to produce a head of broccoli, or 3.3 gallons to grow a single tomato? This information about the water footprint of food products — that is, the amount of water required to produce them — is important to understand, especially for a state that dedicates about 80 percent of its water to agriculture.' But for those truly interested in lowering their water footprint, those numbers pale next to the water required to fatten livestock. Beef turns out to have an overall water footprint of roughly four million gallons per ton produced (PDF). By contrast, the water footprint for "sugar crops" like sugar beets is about 52,000 gallons per ton; for vegetables it's 85,000 gallons per ton; and for starchy roots it's about 102,200 gallons per ton.

There's also one single plant that's leading California's water consumption and it's one that's not generally cultivated for humans: alfalfa. Grown on over a million acres in California, alfalfa sucks up more water than any other crop in the state. And it has one primary destination: cattle. 'If Californians were eating all the beef they produced, one might write off alfalfa's water footprint as the cost of nurturing local food systems. But that's not what's happening. Californians are sending their alfalfa, and thus their water, to Asia.' Alfalfa growers are now exporting some 100 billion gallons of water a year from this drought-ridden region to the other side of the world in the form of alfalfa.

Beef eaters are already paying more. Water-starved ranches are devoid of natural grasses that cattle need to fatten up so ranchers have been buying supplemental feed at escalating prices or thinning their herds to stretch their feed dollars. But McWilliams says that in the case of agriculture and drought, there's a clear and accessible actions most citizens can take: Changing one's diet to replace 50 percent of animal products with edible plants like legumes, nuts and tubers results in a 30 percent reduction in an individual's food-related water footprint. Going vegetarian reduces that water footprint by almost 60 percent. 'It's seductive to think that we can continue along our carnivorous route, even in this era of climate instability. The environmental impact of cattle in California, however, reminds us how mistaken this idea is coming to seem.'"

We just had a much needed rain. To protect fish from swimming up the delta they dumped thousands of acre feet of water into the bay. I'm all for restoring wetlands but we should prioritize water for humans during droughts. The poor are the hardest hit.

Thing is we are not talking about subsistence prioritization, we are talking about water's usage in what is essentially a luxury industry, an industry that is driving up the cost of everything else in the process. In this case, if we are going to 'prioritize humans' then that is it, humans will consume as much as they can and leave nothing, so there is no point where humans are 'done' and resources can be diverted for preservation.

As for the poor being hardest hit, that is not the fault of the drought, that is the fault of the middle class. Cheap beef raises water consumption and prices of everything else.

It seems to me that almost all of this concern over running short of water centers around having enough available clean drinking water; a very different issue than actually not having water at all.

California is a *coastal* state, up against an ocean full of water, yet they're seriously entertaining such elaborate ideas as pumping water from an aquifer far below the desert, to areas around L.A. (Never mind the strong possibility that once they drain it, it won't refill for quite a long time again.)

People keep discussing desalination as too costly and inefficient a process... as something that's "not Green enough". IMO, that's ridiculous. The clear answer is to do more R&D to make that process more feasible! When you're short on drinkable water but you sit up against an ocean full of it, and removing the salt is the only real obstacle? Figure out a good way to remove the salt!

A lot of green power sources like wind are only usable for peak load generation, why not use unclaimed power for feeding seawater desalination? California has something in excess of 3GW of wind power and a rough figure of 14kWH/kgal of Pacific Ocean desalination.

If 10% of that power were available for generation but unusable by the grid on a daily basis, you could desal 21 million gallons of water or nearly 8 billion gallons per year. It's only 3% of the LA area annual use, but it's basically free water since the wind is blowing but there's no use for the power in the grid.

As renewables grow, something like this could be a great power sink for renewables that can generate at rates beyond what the grid can absorb and would otherwise be shut down. The desal plant could power/up down based on the need to absorb more or less electricity.

The poor are ALWAYS hardest hit. The definition of "poor" in general context is "those lacking resources." No matter what harmful event happens on Earth, the "have-not's" are going to be most adversely impacted; the "have's" would have left, bought supplies, lived in brick & mortar instead of a modular home. lived on higher ground, etc.

Beef cattle are fed grain at the auction lot to fast fatten them for conversion to burgers, but many/most ranchers I know use both coastal and alfalfa hay to supplement what nature provides on the range.

Also wrong from TFA "exporting some 100 billion gallons of water a year" in Alfalfa. Alfalfa is typically dried/cured before use and it doesn't suck up every drop of water put on it. Just like there aren't 5 Gal of water in a head of broccoli. Most of that water goes back into the air and falls as show/rain in the rockies.

Closer to 10% wrong. Beef cattle are rarely fed alfalfa - I say this as a former "farmer" 30 years ago as a teen. Alfalfa is twice as expensive as timothy or field grass. It does, however contain calcium, which is great (necessary) for lactating cattle a goats, which is why it's used mcuh more for dairy animals. They pretty much all get grain, though, because the energy content is higher. For Dairy, that means more calories available for producing milk, and for beef it translates to a heavier animal, which in turn is a higher dollar yield at market.

The 100 billion gallons of water in exported alfalfa, I agree, is so stupid that it basically invalidates the entire article's credibility.

You seem to misunderstand the "consumption of water" concept used in the article. If you irrigate an arid region like California, you increase the amount of water evaporating. Since evaporated water can't be used anymore, it is lost for local production (except you create some big ass industry to get evaporated water back from air). That's why in the case of an arid region, we really have water consumption (e.g. less water than before), other than in a humid region, where there is a surplus of water from rainfall compared with the possible evaporation, and thus any water used can be recycled or replaced by fresh water.

When the article talks about "exporting water", it actually means that this water used to grow the alfalfa is lost for any other uses, because it is long evaporated. It's not the actual water that gets exported to China (except if the wind blows the vapor to China where it adds to local rainfalls), it's the consumption of water necessary to actually grow enough alfalfa to export it.

The main question is: Where does the water California is watering its crops come from, and what will California do if the source is exhausted?

The main question is: Where does the water California is watering its crops come from, and what will California do if the source is exhausted?

The water California is watering its crops with comes primarily from rivers. The rivers are watershed from rain which condensed out of water vapor in the atmosphere. Most of that water they use then evaporates and becomes water vapor in the atmosphere where it eventually condenses and falls as rain again and feeds the rivers.

It's the water cycle that you should have learned about in elementary school.

The only reason the rivers that are the source of the water would be exhausted is if it stops raining. If that happens, it won't be because we were raising too much alfalfa.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect on devastating display: those who are utterly clueless about a subject (water resource management) have no idea how ignorant they are and "lecture" in insufferable manner about utter irrelevancies.

No one is supposing that alfalfa growing is violating the conservation of mass or sending water into the fourth dimension never to be seen again. Of course any water lost to evaporation will eventually, somewhere, fall once again as rain.

The problem is that the amount that falls where California can use it is limited, and currently inadequate for the demands placed on it. If it evaporates that is lost to any other use, when it falls again somewhere in the world, it won't be in California.

It's a frequent "let's play absurd" argument from meat eaters that plants have a central nervous system, too, and suffer and that they are being nice to plants by not eating meat.

But processing plants into meat before consumption requires easily six times as much vegetable matter than if you eat it right away. Now one can't put this to an immediate comparison since obviously the human digestive system can make almost no use at all from eating grass, so one needs to pick grass variants (like rice or maize)

Most farmers who grow alfalfa are those who got water at throw away prices back in 1920s/1930s when the Hoover dam was being built, when they pumped the Colorado river over the Sierra Neveda to irrigate the water starved central valley. Then through political action, through law suits and by claiming these as their "right" they have been taking water and much below market prices and wasting it all in stupid crops like alfalfa. If they paid market rates, we could just shrug and leave it to free markets. But after taking in all that water pumped by the government, at far below cost, at far below market rates, they turn around and claim to be "freedom lovers", "get the government out of my hair", "government never creates value" "taxation is theft" libertarians.

Most farmers who grow alfalfa are those who got water at throw away prices back in 1920s/1930s when the Hoover dam was being built, when they pumped the Colorado river over the Sierra Neveda to irrigate the water starved central valley....

Not that I'm completely disagreeing with you but you do realize you are arguing against government compensation for it's wrong doing. Additionally, by implication, you are right about the central valley using more water than it would have normally gotten and the subsidies are much to blame for that. Those subsidies also help produce a lot of vegetables that would not otherwise grow in that region.

Can someone explain to me how this sentence even makes sense? It seems to imply that the sate is somehow losing water forever by shipping it abroad. But when the water is consumed, whether in China or California, it will eventually make its way back out into the Pacific Ocean, which is the ultimate source for all of California's water. So once the water is used to grow a crop, for the purpose of California's future wetness, it doesn't really matter one iota where the crop ultimately gets consumed.

Can someone explain to me how this sentence even makes sense? It seems to imply that the sate is somehow losing water forever by shipping it abroad. But when the water is consumed, whether in China or California, it will eventually make its way back out into the Pacific Ocean, which is the ultimate source for all of California's water. So once the water is used to grow a crop, for the purpose of California's future wetness, it doesn't really matter one iota where the crop ultimately gets consumed.

It should probably read "now exporting some 100 billion gallons of fresh water. When we run out of fresh water, the real wars begin.

Can someone explain to me how this sentence even makes sense? It seems to imply that the sate is somehow losing water forever by shipping it abroad. But when the water is consumed, whether in China or California, it will eventually make its way back out into the Pacific Ocean, which is the ultimate source for all of California's water. So once the water is used to grow a crop, for the purpose of California's future wetness, it doesn't really matter one iota where the crop ultimately gets consumed.

Even with all the rain that's fallen on California lately, we are still years of rain like this away from aquifer replenishment. This coupled with next year's El Nino may set back the complete inviability of the inland empire several years, but it's still coming because of our water use strategies. In short, water rights have become "use it or lose it" so people not using their water allotment are having their water rights taken away, down to their current usage. Fail to use the water for just one year, see what happens. So they're using the water to grow crap crops, or just pumping it and then selling it [illlegally] and the water goes someplace else to grow grapes or pot.

We are running out of useful water.

There are a number of approaches we might use to solve this problem. The one I favor is cutting off SoCal and letting them fuck off. Sadly, Los Angeles receives enough yearly rainfall to cover 100% of its needs in many years, but something like 99% of it runs straight into the ocean because that whole area is just one big sandbox.

I though most of it came from snow melt on the western half of the continental divide.

Exporting 100 billion gallons, is, of course, utter bullshit. The only water that gets actually exported is the water weight of the exports. There is additional water lost through evaporation due to agricultural irrigation, which exceeds the non-irrigated evaporation rate. That last one is the real target, and the concern of this veginazi.

No it is not. Maybe not all, but a large percentage of the water is lost to evaporation, which is then spread around the world. That is, California is not a closed ecosystem. Most of that water follows the winds. This leaves you with a desert.

artificial market controls keep the price of meat low, so we consume excess amounts.as the price rises, consumption will go down and the problem solves itself. meat will turn from main course to side dish real fast.

i never understood the fixation with 100% meat. meatloaf > pure beef. people were hyperventilating online when taco bell announced their "meat" was 40% meat.

Enviros don't like it because when you desalinate seawater you get two things:1) potable water, and2) seawater that's much saltier than normal which is typically all dumped into the same place in the ocean, which is going to kill anything nearby but extremophiles.

#2 is probably solvable but will involve spending more ZOMG MY TAX MONEYS!!!1.

Why aren't they measuring per metabolizable calorie instead of ton? Meat is more energy dense than a head of lettuce.
Also, water consumed by plants and creatures isn't lost forever. Sure, the bonds are cracked to make hydrocarbons, but the H and the O still exists. It's not like our bodies perform nuclear reactions.

In case no one has noticed, California is a desert (or nearly one) for most of its area. Before the farm subsidy act of the 1950's, no one grew food crops in California, and no one raised cattle. Then, after subsidies were based on your distance from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where they get 30-40" of rain a year, suddenly California became *the* address for raising food. When you can raise dairy cattle at a loss, milk them at a loss, and produce a gallon of milk for $6, and still sell it for $2 wholesale -- and the government ensures you're making a profit by handing you a $5 a gallon subsidy, of course you're going to raise cattle and farm in California.

California has to drain the Colorado river, and the showsheds of something like 1,000,000 hectares of mountains to even get close to their water needs on a good year. In the meantime, farms in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, and the rest of the heartland are all collapsing into bankruptcy, unable to compete with the ever-increasing subsidies bought by the legislatures of California with its 50+ congressmen and electoral votes.

Not true.
What do you think Silicon Valley and the surrounding areas were before HP, et al took up shop?
Farms, orchards and ranches. And this was before the 1950's. [amazon.com]
From Salinas, Watsonville, over the hill to Los Gatos, all of the Santa Clara valley, up the peninsula, across the bay, up in the north bay...
Tons of food was grown and rasied around the bay area before it turned into a hipster billionaires playground. Hell, there may still be some orchards hiding in Los Altos...

I think you are talking about southern California, which is a desert.

The Mediterranean Climate areas of the state, and especially the bay area and areas north were extremely fruitful and supported the largest numbers of native Americans on the continent before Europeans arrived.

There have always been, and always will be water wars..Not because it's an inherently scarce commodity, but because the distribution is uneven, and randomly varies.

So the folks who plant the pistachio orchards are betting on having enough water sometime in the future to be able to sell 90% of the world's pistachios. It's not like we're subsistence farmers: this is a luxury good to a certain extent, and the Resnicks (who also bring you POMwonderful and Fiji water) are "betting the farm" on this.

Everyone talks about how insignificant the delta smelt is.. but it's not just the smelt: that's a convenient indicator; it's also the salmon, and the other things in the delta.

On the other hand, the "preserve the delta" folks are just as bad as the "make the deserts of the San Joaquin bloom" folks. Those delta farms are just as artificial, just 100 years older. Back in the day, there used to be huge floods that would cover much of the valley floor with water. This was aggravated by hydraulic and other mining in the 1850s which put enormous amounts of sediment into what's now the delta. To this day there are huge hills of mine tailings all over the central valley, north of Sacramento, in particular.

There's a reason Stockton used be called Tuleville: it was basically a swamp filled with tules.

They also cut down most of the trees in the valley to provide fuel for steamboats going up the river.

So lets just accept that things in the central valley, and in California in general, are "not natural" and haven't been "natural" for 150 years. Let's recognize that farming is inherently a "subject to nature's whims" business, and, yep, sometimes you're not going to get a crop because it didn't rain/snow enough. Sure enough, you'll need to fallow some land in some years: this has been the case for millenia, and now that a tiny, tiny part of the nation's workforce is occupied in agriculture, it doesn't even need to be particularly disruptive in a economic sense. We're not in early 20th century society, where a drought or flood causes mass migration, a'la the Joads of Steinbeck, or even the Great Northward Migration of African Americans.

First off, cattle should NOT be eating diets wholly of corn and alfalfa. Cattle are grazers and should by and large be eating grasses and the like. The issue is that we are trying to raise cattle in a concentrated habitat rather than naturally.

Likewise, look at the midwest and all the corn and soy fields. The immense amount of water drained from prehistoric aquifers is unsustainable. Yet, millions of head of bison roamed the midwest. They fed on the prairie grasses, deep rooted grasses that survived the periodic droughts and protected the soil from those droughts. The bison ate the grasses, pooped, fertilized, and created further soil.

In fact, permaculturalists have used this method with combinations of cattle and chickens. In those systems the rate of soil growth can be immense, one older system had to replace their fence because so much new fertile soil was made by the intense but balanced grazing of animals.

It is one thing to say that if we went vegetarian that would provide more food. But it's another to discount how much water we pump out to grow those plants suitable for vegetarians. Versus the ranging of cattle on natural grasses that persist on the mere natural rainfall.

Consider how sustainable meat would be if cattle ranged suburbia, grazing on all the grass of suburbian yards. Suddenly, that cow uses very little additional water....WHEN ITS EATING GRASS!!!

Please note, my yard is green with grass, perhaps not gourmey fancy yard grass, but I NEVER water my lawn. Just mow it periodically. Grass doesn't need watering most of the time as long as it is a grass suitable for your region's natural balance.

This "sub-par meat" is actually tastier than corn-fed, and can also be free of antibiotics. Corn-fed cattle develop ulcers which are invariably treated with liberal doses of antibiotics. The "free market" prices grass-fed beef at a premium, suggesting that it is in fact more desirable than corn-fed, and thus not sub-par.

Alfalfa is also rotated with corn to replenish the nitrogen in the soil. I believe that if you just grow corn on the same plot year after year without crop rotation, the soil becomes "tired" and your corn quality suffers. I suppose that alfalfa is mostly going to cattle, and we could rotate the corn with soybeans instead, but there's more to growing alfalfa than just feeding cows.

Wow, nice try to mask the "be a vegetarian" propaganda (starting with the "gee meat is pretty expensive..." and then down to the soft sell "50%" reduction before you really get to the "but it's really best to not eat meat at all". I see what you did there, doing some multiplying and coming up with huge numbers to sound shocking but at the same time being completely reductive to the complexities - as stated, a lb of beef is worth a lot more to the economy than a lb of watercress.

Truth is, drought is an expected symptom of humans tapping the resources of a place that is inhospitable to the way which we demand to live. Southern California lawns were not meant to look like lush New England summers year-round. It's also cheaper in many ways to raise cattle there, which is why folks do it there as opposed to other places (though there is great cattle outside of CA, this piece only focuses on CA). They could go places with cheaper or free and plentiful water but pay more for everything else.

We've sure got plenty of water here on the other coast. Hell many of us have pumps in our basements pushing it out as fast as we can pump it during some seasons, pumping it out into the back yard for free if anyone wanted to take it. But I can't complain - if it bothered me that much, I could just move to CA.

This is, of course, not real water nor the water contained in the crop itself, but the water used to irrigate the crop, water that could be used for something more importantâ"at least according to the authors.

That is right, they are counting as "exported" water which....the vast majority of.... evaporates locally, and stays in the local environment.

They're operating under the well established scientific fact that when water hits the ground, it's gone. It just simply ceases to exist. If you think maybe it's used to carry minerals up a plant's stem and into the leaves where it's aspirated out into the air and becomes water vapor that falls back down onto the ground when it rains elsewhere, you're just talking fantasy and science fiction. Clearly the water is just GONE!

A key factor in human survival is our ability to eat virtually anything. Cricket flour tastes surprisingly good and can be made into a variety of products which do not in any way resemble the original source:http://chapul.com/ [chapul.com]

Crickets have almost the protein content of beef and use less than half the feed. Best of all, they consume almost no water.

Missing from the vegetarian fear fest is that meat has ten times the caloric value of vegetables. For example, the 100 calories achieved with 1.2 ounces of porterhouse steak requires eating more than 12 ounces of Broccoli. [drfuhrman.com]. That ten-fold higher mass also has an even higher bulk, since vegetables are much less dense than meat. That means ten times the cost, at least, to ship the same caloric content as vegetables compared to meat.

Of course we need vegetables too, for vitamins and minerals, as part of a balanced diet. But meat has high value as a compact source of calories required for daily life. As far as water usage goes, the California drought is temporary. There is no scientific evidence [blogspot.com] that the intensity or frequency of drought in the western U.S. is increasing (). All that is required is managing agricultural cycles to accommodate dry periods. When you interfere with that management, for instance by blocking water supplies to agriculture to protect delta smelt, then drought can get the upper hand. That's what's happening today in California.

Average age of slaughter for cattle is 18 to 24 months depending on who you ask (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_best_age_for_beef_slaughter?#slide=2), and the average consumption of water for dry cattle is 38 L/day (http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/engineer/facts/07-023.htm#2). Take the maximum of 24 months you get: 38 L x 365 days in a year x 2 = 27,740 litres. Which is approx. 7,328 gallons. 1 ton is approx. 2,000 pounds...average weight for cattle at slaughter is around 1,400 pounds (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_slaughter_weight_for_a_cow?#slide=6), so that would be 7,328 gallons x 2 = 14,626 gallons of water.

The article says it takes 145,000 gallons of water. I'd like to see the author's source material.

But either way, it's nice to see that the author is not pushing his vegan agenda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_E._McWilliams).

First, people like to talk about "consuming" water. Water isn't consumed because it isn't turned into something else permanently, unlike say, oil or coal, which do not replenish in a reasonable amount of time. The only time the amount of water being used is actually relevant is when it's being pulled from a finite source for irrigation, like an underground aquifer or a river. A large portion of the planet gets sufficient rainfall to support all manner of agriculture. Raising alfalfa in California is dumb. Raising rice in Japan is not.

Feeding cattle on grassland that is not irrigated is not "consuming" water. As long as the land is not over-grazed it's not really an issue. In fact, the grass needs to be eaten and fertilized to thrive - it's co-evolved with large ruminants like cattle or horses.

So, these statistics are meaningless because it depends on where you're growing the crops as to whether or not you're consuming a finite resource. They're only useful in a local context. There are other side effects of raising cattle, such as deforestation, that are relevant.

Well, you're mostly right - I mean even dried alfalfa is probably made of 90% atoms that used to be air and water before the alfalfa "ate" it. Nothing like thousands of gallons though - that's mostly all waste from getting the water to them inefficiently and just dumping most of it back into the environment. Grow things in a sealed greenhouse and the issue should disappear, even in the desert. There's also secondary issues of water *contamination*, which can be a big problem with both plants and animals.

As for the co-evolution - don't forget the wolves/large predators that are an important part of the equation. They totally change the grazing patterns of ruminants into something that nurtures the land, undisturbed ruminants tend to be extremely destructive. A pretty example: http://www.filmsforaction.org/... [filmsforaction.org]

3.3 gallons per tomato? That's a suspicious figure. No, I didn't RTFA, but let's run the numbers... How many tomato plants in an acre? How many fruits per plant? Multiply that by 3.3, and it seems very high.

The statement that they export 100 billion gallons of water in alfalfa is silly. There is a sod farm down the road from me and they water grass like crazy. Is all that water in the grass? When they cut, roll and ship the sod does the water go with it? Nope. Some of the water is used by the grass for it's growth, a lot evaporates and a lot goes into the ground returning to the water table. This is pure propaganda of the worst kind. What about the cattle? How much water is in a pound of ground beef? Hundreds? Of course not! It may take hundreds to grow it but the cows piss out almost all the water they take in. That water doesn't ship with them. There is a cost to grow these things and it does take water but water is replenishable although if you overpopulate an area (California) it will become scarce. Maybe deserts were meant to be dry? This article is sensationalism.

The statement that they export 100 billion gallons of water in alfalfa is silly. There is a sod farm down the road from me and they water grass like crazy. Is all that water in the grass? When they cut, roll and ship the sod does the water go with it? Nope. Some of the water is used by the grass for it's growth, a lot evaporates and a lot goes into the ground returning to the water table. This is pure propaganda of the worst kind. What about the cattle? How much water is in a pound of ground beef? Hundreds? Of course not! It may take hundreds to grow it but the cows piss out almost all the water they take in. That water doesn't ship with them. There is a cost to grow these things and it does take water but water is replenishable although if you overpopulate an area (California) it will become scarce. Maybe deserts were meant to be dry? This article is sensationalism.

Sorry, but you seem to have missed the point that the alfalfa is being shipped to China for a profit. Or to put it another way, any water conservation project means cheaper water for the alfalfa growers, which means more profits for the corporations that own the farms. This is corruption at it's worse, to the detriment of the people of California, as well as the environment, in the name of profits.

By that logic, stop using your computer. Between the mining of elements used in its construction, the huge amount of water needed to produce the parts, and everything else that goes into making a computer, it's harming society.

Oh wait, it makes you happy using a computer? Well then, carry on, society be damned.

Computers can have a net benefit to society. We can figure out with their aid how to solve problems, including the ones they cause. Eating a steak solves nothing other than your own personal satisfaction.

Obviously you cant read. I eat meat, I just had a nice burger yesterday on the grill. That being said you are more worried about the monetary value of the meat, where I am worried about the long term social value of the meat, including the effect of you eating that meat on the availability of resources to your great great grandchildren. My issue is about sustaining the planet, where yours is about sustaining your wallet.

Not all farm land is suitable for growing vegetables, but it may be suitable for grazing. The big problem we have is that the herds are larger than what the growth on a certain land area can sustain and therefore carbohydrate supplements have to be purchased.

In contrast there's a balanced farming where the area of a farm only have the amount of animals that it can support, no more. Some supplements may be needed even then, but in those cases it's mostly a question of minerals, not carbohydrates.

The amount of water consumed by a bovine is only to some extent wasted, the majority ends up as urine that completes the cycle of returning nutrients to the land where the grazing occurs.

Overall - the major problem with water consumption for beef production is when the farm is unable to support the herd without artificial support.

Not all farm land is suitable for growing vegetables, but it may be suitable for grazing. The big problem we have is that the herds are larger than what the growth on a certain land area can sustain and therefore carbohydrate supplements have to be purchased.

And if anyone challenges this as the legitimate scientific method, just tell them "clearly you don't understand how science works."

Good thing that you aren't following in that vein then, citing credible sources and supplying a solid, logical argument that can be clearly traced from premise to conclusion. And even better, you're doing it not for your own aggrandizement, but for the betterment of mankind. You go Mr. Anonymous hero!

There are some major differences in the water.Animals can move towards water, including many naturally occurring locations. Plants grow where they are planted, and they are dependent on nature giving them water.

Now the real issue is about how we farm. These farms in the dessert, because the weather stays warmer all year, comes at a cost of heavy water usage.Farms up in the north east are smaller, however they take advantage of many of the natural resources around them, ponds, adequate rainfall. At the expense of a shorter growing season.

Which means that they rip up stream banks, kill native vegetation, and defecate in the water. Domestic cattle really destructive of the watershed and have a large negative impact on water quality. Also, sure cattle can move, but since the drought is regional they would have to move to Iowa or Indiana to get far enough away.

Domestic cattle really destructive of the watershed and have a large negative impact on water quality.

Not so fast... There is a growing awareness that well managed herbivores are the only way to reverse desertification and halt climate change. [youtube.com] The key to this counter-intuitive fact is the "well managed" part. (The link above is to a TED Talk by Allan Savory.)

If you put a hundred head of cattle on a hundred acres of pasture, and just leave them there, they will roam around, munching only the most palatable plants (leaving the weeds to thrive), endlessly compacting the soil and disturbing the ecosystem. But if you instead give those same 100-head just one acre per day to graze, they'll eat everything in sight (helping to control weeds), aerate the soil with their hooves, and fertilize it with their dung -- and not come back to the same acre for another 100 days.

This more accurately mimics the pattern found in nature, where herbivores are "mobbed up" and kept moving by predators. And it gives the land time to rest in between visits, allowing the biome to absorb the nutrients and recover from the disturbance. Just look at the before and after photos [google.com.tw] in Savory's TED Talk to see the effects of well managed herbivores.

Another great example is what Joel Salatin is doing at Polyface Farms in Virginia. [youtube.com] (This link is a 10min clip from a talk by Michael Pollan, describing the Polyface model.)

Oh yeah, and then there's the whole "permaculture" movement, as exemplified by Geoff Lawton in his "greening the desert" [youtube.com] project in Jordan.

In short, there are many, many options available to us, before we start talking about "going veggie" to save the planet.

For those interested in a casual description of this approach, it's explained a bit in the book "Omivore's Dilemma". They follow around the operations of a small(ish) farm doing pretty much this same thing.

The rainforests are just the latest targets of industrial agriculture. In the US, for example, all of the slash and burn to destroy the deciduous forests of the mid-west took place after the natives were sent packing to reservations. Since then, it's been just standard "modern" farming with tractors and chemicals leaving the soil barren most of the year. The dust bowl on the prairies was a direct result of the "sodbusters" removing native vegetation.

Well, it is easy enough:
http://ohioline.osu.edu/ls-fac... [osu.edu]
Once the area has been over-grazed and compacted by the animal, the topsoils erodes into the river, leaving only infertile soil where barely anything can grow...

There is no shortage of water in the world as a whole, and human activities do not "use up" water. It's the most infinitely reusable resource there is. We just need to get serious about desalination. In places like California, cranking out fresh water might be a better use for windfields than trying to shoehorn fluctuating amounts of power into the grid. The new graphene process can be far more efficient than traditional R-O (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/graphene-water-desalination-0702.html)

But of course, you will never hear this argument from "environmental activists," because their whole agenda is fewer people, subsisting in increasingly primitive conditions. If they could engineer a plague that would wipe us all out, they would do it.

We just need to get serious about desalination.... But of course, you will never hear this argument from "environmental activists," because their whole agenda is fewer people, subsisting in increasingly primitive conditions. If they could engineer a plague that would wipe us all out, they would do it.

Oh, come off it. You won't hear many environmentalists arguing for desalination because (a) it has enormous energy costs which themselves have environmental impacts, and (b) it's just a band-aid over overconsumption, and it won't discourage people from continuing on an unsustainable trend until we get to a point that technology can't solve.

Plus, you shouldn't mentally lump an entire group in with its extremists. Do you really feel it's fair when people paint all conservatives as white supremacists just because that elements exists at the fringes of the conservative movement? Then it's no more fair to paint all environmentalists as neo-primitive genocidal maniacs. Yeah, they're there, but they aren't the majority by a long shot.

By far, most of us are motivated by concerns over human survival. We're concerned that humanity is steering itself off a cliff and are a willing to make a few economic sacrifices right now to avoid catastrophic ones later. (You know, just like most conservatives want us to do with our national spending.) It's just all about long-term planning and responsible use of resources. It does not involve killing people -- that's what we want to stop from happening.

Oh here we go again..You want to be the first to volunteer to reduce the population by one? I hear a CPAP mask and a tank of helium are an easy way out..Good luck trying to convince people to not have children, especially the Bible Belt people who literally believe it's their God-given right to litter the Earth with their offspring. Also good luck convincing any other group of people in the world not to have children for similar reasons, and also because of this insignificant little matter of "propagation of the species" that just happens to be the most basic drive of any living thing.So what's your solution, smart guy you might say? We need to find a way to get off this planet.

Yeah, here we go again. There is no infinite growth scenario for any species. Education is the solution, not throwing your hands up and saying "it's hard, so why bother." Culture needs to change to encourage individual achievement, not "get all the money I can to pass onto my children." Look at Japan. Population growth is declining, and there are no draconian rules on procreation like in China. As a matter of fact, the government is encouraging procreation.

Good luck trying to convince people to not have children, especially the Bible Belt people who literally believe it's their God-given right to litter the Earth with their offspring.

It's not just the Bible Belt -- the UN Fundamental Declaration of Human Rights (article 16) declares that "men and women of full age... have the right to marry and to found a family." It's pretty totalitarian to suggest otherwise... which you really should try to be more aware of, lest it damage your pitch...

I was on a plane from ATL to PHL recently. Upon boarding, I noticed some of my fellow passengers were wearing some clothes that seemed anachronistic. Based on this observation, along with the flight's destination, I figured they were Amish or Mennonites or some other fringe religious people. Then arrived the passenger that had reserved the seat next to mine: a woman, perhaps around 50 years of age, somewhat overweight, dressed in sweatpants and a sweatshirt. She seemed like your run-of-the-mill cat lady, or

The big feature of a meat-based diet is being able to eat all year-round. But for the consumers in major metropolitan markets, seasonality of fruits and veggies has no meaning. We've figured out the supply chain to keep the staples produced year-round.

I'm old enough to remember why the traditional menu in the Midwest is so bland and homogeneous; there wasn't any alternative. Once the first freeze set in you had a couple of weeks of fresh veggies left, a month or two of fruit, and then you were down to potatoes, carrots, onions, meat, cabbage, and a few apples until late spring. If you wanted anything that wasn't stored in the root cellar you needed to can it in the summer. My mom had a canner, and I still remember sweltering summer days with my mom, g

That's all very interesting, except that all animals only borrow water - they give it back in the form of water vapor when they breathe, sweat (for some) and pee.

Exactly, water is a renewable resource and extremely recyclable. It's not like the water used to produce any food is all lost to that food. What the food item doesn't retain is passed on to something else.

No this is wrong thinking. Most of the water that is used to generate meat goes into growing the crops to feed the animals, and most of this is lost directly through respiration of the plants. The pee is neither here nor there. Outsourcing your diet by growing plants to feed animals and eating the animals is grossly inefficient on so many levels.

Where, exactly, so you think your drinking water comes from? Animal breath, sweat, piss, and former animal breath/sweat/piss that has already been condensed into current bodies of water on the planet, or trapped in underground aquifers from ancient animals

Water "lost" to a region is that which is directly moved when the food is harvested and trucked out of the area, or evaporation due to agriculture which exceeds the natural evaporation rate and results in dispersion outside of the local climate area.

There's a bit of slight of hand in that article. They go on and on about a little fish nobody's ever heard of as if that is the only reason, and they call that water a diversion even though it's really a not-diversion.

They slip in in one place that it's also for salmon. Yes, the incredibly commercially valuable salmon.

Humans have been turning desert into agricultural land via irrigation since the time of the Mesopotamians. Most of California is too dry to maintain agriculture and cities without irrigation. Which was working well until the government decided to dump massive amounts of water to protect a bait fish.

I have a very difficult time believing this. This sounds like junk, alarmist science. The problems are more than just meat. We cannot even begin to understand what impact human beings have on the environment.

Wah, science is hard. I don't understand, therefor no one does.

Yes the human impact is well understood. The question is only how bad it really is, and what can we do to slow down the destruction. We're not even talking about reversing it yet, just slowing it so that we have more time to study.